Pieter

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Pieter.

https://www.goodreads.com/pieterswier

Eternity and Othe...
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (page 110 of 442)
Jul 14, 2026 01:39AM

 
Tree
Pieter is currently reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (page 30 of 192)
May 27, 2026 07:11AM

 
Loading...
Julien Green
“You used to be able to push open the little door inside the church and find yourself in a delightful piece of waste ground, covered with vegetation, where your feet might stumble against some of the oldest stones in Paris. Hard by the chevet of St Julian one of the last vestiges of 'Philippe Auguste's Wall' stuck up abruptly out of the long grass like a rock emerging from the sea, and a twisted tree, slowly dying beneath the weight of several centuries, still sprouted leaves that quivered overhead. Who remembers that place, so attuned to day-dreaming? In the distance the towers of Notre-Dame, white in stormy weather, looked black against the July sky, and the occasional tugboat on the Seine would utter a long-drawn-out, melancholy cry, the misty note lingering, and fading into the blue beyond. Yet the hubbub of Paris seemed to die at the edges of that small solitude where I loved to come and think. The silence around me was like a dwelling in which the past had sought refuge.”
Julien Green, Paris

Jorge Luis Borges
The Labyrinth

Zeus himself could not undo the web
of stone closing around me, I have forgotten the men I was before; I follow the hated
path of monotonous walls
that is my destiny. Severe galleries
which curve in secret circles
to the end of the years. Parapets
cracked by the day’s usury.
In the pale dust I have discerned
signs that frighten me. In the concave
evenings the air has carries a roar
toward me, or the echo of a desolate howl.
I know there is an Other in the shadows,
whose fate it is to wear out the long solitudes
which weave and unweave this Hades
and to long for my blood and devour my death.
Each of us seeks the other. If only this were the final day of waiting.

- S.K.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

Gerald Murnane
“My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.”
Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape

Willem Brakman
“Bomen zijn mij altijd verdomd dierbaar geweest, ik kan gerust zeggen dat zij het zout waren van mijn ziel, ik kan mij bijvoorbeeld verliezen in het delicaat verlatene van een tak tegen een winterhemel zo grauw als een schar als geen die ik ken en kende. De bomen van mijn jeugd, voor het slaapkamerraam, behoren dan ook tot mijn allerdiepste herinneringen, ze zijn vervlochten met koorts, droefenis, zorg en zacht bewegende schaduwen op het behang. Ook aan maanverlichte nachten heb ik de beste herinneringen, als het te heet was om te slapen en ik de vreemde schaduwen over de muur zag kruipen naar het plafond om ten slotte mijn raam donker te bevleugelen. Om nog maar niet te spreken van het herfstlicht, dat als geen ander een eik kan doorschieten met roodhete stralen, of glanst over een olm als over een rots in zee, of zich slaperig verstrikt in een wilg.”
Willem Brakman, Leesclubje

John Cowper Powys
“In the summer when the wind stirs the trees, there is that rushing, swelling sound of masses of heavy foliage, a sound that drowns, in its full-blossomed, undulating, ocean-like murmur, the individual sorrows of trees. But across this leafless unfrequented field these two evergreens could lift to each other their sub-human voices and cry their ancient vegetation-cry, clear and strong; that cry which always seems to come from some underworld of Being, where tragedy is mitigated by a strange undying acceptance beyond the comprehension of the troubled hearts of men and women.”
John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

220 Goodreads Librarians Group — 331293 members — last activity 6 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
110797 Indie Authors — 2471 members — last activity Jun 25, 2026 09:49AM
Book lovers.
year in books
Carlijn...
320 books | 4 friends

Fergus Nm
975 books | 53 friends

Sam Pulham
528 books | 34 friends

Adam Dalva
1,544 books | 4,985 friends

Bill Ke...
3,540 books | 3,782 friends

Fabian
1,794 books | 4,998 friends

Hannah
363 books | 5 friends

Black  ...
51 books | 240 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Pieter

Lists liked by Pieter